For Better Democracy, Make Everyone Vote

For Better Democracy, Make Everyone Vote

Article excerpt

The United States prides itself as the beacon of democracy, but
it's very likely no president has ever been elected by a majority of
American adults.

It's our own fault -- because voter participation rates are
running below 60 percent, a candidate would have to win 85 percent
or more of the vote to be elected by a majority.

Compulsory voting, as exists in Australia and more than two dozen
other countries, would fix that problem. As William Galston of the
Brookings Institution argues, "Jury duty is mandatory; why not
voting?"

Mandating voting has a clear effect: It raises participation
rates. Before Australia adopted compulsory voting in 1924, for
example, it had turnout rates similar to those of the U.S. After
voting became mandatory, participation immediately jumped from 59
percent in the election of 1922 to 91 percent in the election of
1925.

The political scientists Lisa Hill and Jonathon Louth of the
University of Adelaide note that "turnout rates among the voting age
population in Australia have remained consistently high and against
the trend of steadily declining voting participation in advanced
democracies worldwide."

For economists, the puzzle is not why voting participation rates
are so low in voluntary systems, but why they're so high. The so-
called paradox of voting, highlighted in a 1957 book by the
political scientist Anthony Downs, occurs because the probability
that any individual voter can alter the outcome of an election is
effectively zero. So if voting imposes any cost, in terms of time or
hassle, a perfectly rational person would conclude it's not worth
doing. The problem is that if each person were to reach such a
rational conclusion no one would vote, and the system would
collapse.

Mandatory voting solves that collective action problem by
requiring people to vote and punishing nonvoters with a fine. In
Australia, the penalty starts small and rises significantly for
those who repeatedly fail to vote.

Beyond simply raising participation, compulsory voting could
alter the role of money in elections. Turn-out-the-vote efforts,
often bankrolled by big-money groups, would become largely
irrelevant. Negative advertising could be less effective, because a
central aim of such ads is to discourage participation in the
opponent's camp.

The other effects of compulsory voting are more difficult to
assess and tend to divide political scientists. Some proponents,
such as Mr. …